The Lifeboat

Those
who live along the Napo river – a tributary of the Amazon river in
Peruvian territory – pray for one thing: never to get sick.

For
the more than 50,000 persons who live in almost completely isolated
communities along the 667-km-long Peruvian stretch of the river, even
the simplest disease can become a catastrophe: Iquitos, the nearest
town with a hospital, is often impossible to reach for those who move
on a pyrogue. And for many, the scarce public transport on the river
is simply too expensive. Moreover, Iquitos happens to be the largest
town in the world with no road access (it can only be reached by boat
or airplane), a fact that has a dramatic repercussion on the standard
of its health care structures.

The
population of the whole region, plagued by poverty and malnutrition,
is highly affected by several diseases: malaria, dengue, birth
malformations, intestinal infections, tuberculosis, as well as
frequent traumatic events, from gunshot wounds to the accidental fall
off a tree.

The
government is trying to meet the healthcare needs of the Napo
population with the ambitious project of a floating hospital, on
which a team of doctors – paid by the Health ministry –
permanently travels between Iquitos and the border with Ecuador in
45-days voyages, bringing from village to village the assistance that
the communities would otherwise never get. The hospital boat has been
built, and given to the Health ministry, by the Peruvian Navy, which
modified a big barge previously used by drug traffickers and seized
by the police. On board there is a small hospital complete with
delivery room, surgery room, an analysis lab and rooms for
hospitalization. The experiment was launched in June, 2013, and was
so successful that the ship will continue its navigation up and down
the Napo until 2021, while bordering countries such as Brazil,
Ecuador and Colombia are planning to reproduce the initiative for
their own Amazonian communities.

The
boat is not only a floating hospital, but also (something that the
U.S. Embassy in Peru has called “unique in the world”) an actual
miniature branch of the government, which carries an office of the
National Bank as well as workers of the Registry Office and two
social assistants with the ministry of Women with the task of
sensitizing the local people on gender-related issues.